Architecting for disruption – a digital change manifesto

28 September, 2017
David H. Deans
IBM

We already know that technology shifts can disrupt industries. How you choose to invest in IT infrastructure today can impact your organization for the next two decades.

To succeed, your business strategy and your business technology must be inseparable. But who is likely to possess that knowledge – the partner that can help you integrate those components?

Moreover, do you believe that prior enterprise IT infrastructure experience matters? And is it wise to experiment with a vendor that’s new to your industry, when you can utilize one with a proven track record and a deep-domain understanding of your commercial environment?

Let’s consider the following guidelines, and imagine the possibilities. Then, let’s determine how you’ll become the instigator of a digital disruption in your industry, rather than the victim.

Envision your digital business transformation

Today, it’s time to rethink business, technology and data to build a platform for the future of
your business. At a fundamental level, you need to be prepared to select a hybrid IT solution – combining on-premises and off-premises services — that achieve these key goals and objectives:

  • Relentlessly reduce unit IT costs by putting the right workload on the most suitable best-fit infrastructure.
  • Easily and securely store, process and find value in a continuous volume of structured and unstructured data.
  • Continually improve and personalize user experiences by infusing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies.
  • Rapidly design, deploy and maintain your new transformative applications.

As an empowered innovator, you’ll be utilizing the latest servers, storage, cloud and cognitive technologies to transform essential online experiences. You’ll confidently enact your digital transformation, one app at a time. Everything will be built upon a solid hybrid IT foundation, one that supports a highly adaptive and flexible structure for your digital business initiatives.

As a skilled digital transformation architect, you’ll turn increasing volumes of structured and unstructured data into new, easily accessible insights. You’ll continually improve the user’s experiences and applications by infusing AI and ML attributes. You’ll streamline and accelerate your operations by fine-tuning each application, placing workloads on the optimal IT platform.

Empowered by IBM’s integrated architecture

Why focus on architecture? Why now? Because you’ll need a pre-tested and proven blueprint to enable your digital growth agenda. When business and technology objectives are one and the same, you must bring all business platforms together as one technology framework.

Just imagine: an architecture that can scale, that has security baked in and not bolted on. Security can’t be an afterthought. It shouldn’t be something that you address after you’ve launched new services. Security should be at the core of how you manage your data, and how you protect the intellectual property insights that your data scientists have extracted.

The right architecture supports innovation today, tomorrow and beyond. Our IBM architecture has four dimensions that are rich with tools, power and processes designed as an integrated solution to win the hearts and minds of your developers. We can offer your team:

  • Applications and solutions for business and industries trained with deeper data experience and industry expertise than any competitor, including a broad portfolio of cognitive applications.
  • Sophisticated AI services and accelerators, foundational to the architecture, that give you the ability to contextualize across a corpus of data. Our competitors only offer low-level AI without industry specificity.
  • The ability to manage and govern your data regardless of location, respecting compliance and sovereignty. Your data is your data — the right architecture prevents the use of your data to train another client’s AI.
  • A complete spectrum of options for cloud infrastructure, from private (on premises) to hybrid (integration) to public (native) cloud. Public cloud with GPUs and network mesh to accelerate AI training is critical to enable speed-to-market and scale.

Digital reinvention: Start your journey

That said, disruption can open a significant window of opportunity for CIOs and CTOs. Seize the moment, start your journey to achieve an IT advancement now, and thereby position your organization to excel sooner, rather than later.

Discover the IBM Systems difference, unified with IBM Cloud services. We’ve helped numerous valued clients put their data and knowledge to work — digitally reinventing their business for disruption, growth and competitive advantage by infusing the power of cognitive systems and/or cloud services with unmatched deep industry experience.

Start your digital reinvention journey; identify measureable business outcomes; define your digital skill, culture and technology-change objectives. Then learn how to realize your digital growth ambitions and bold application development aspirations around an integrated hybrid IT architecture that’s designed for transformation. View our case studies, showcasing client stories, then reach out to an IBM representative or Business Partner.

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